What is the minimum dimension of a niche space necessary to
represent the overlaps among observed niches? This book presents a
new technique for obtaining a partial answer to this elementary
question about niche space. The author bases his technique on a
relation between the combinatorial structure of food webs and the
mathematical theory of interval graphs.
Professor Cohen collects more than thirty food webs from the
ecological literature and analyzes their statistical and
combinatorial properties in detail. As a result, he is able to
generalize: within habitats of a certain limited physical and
temporal heterogeneity, the overlaps among niches, along their
trophic (feeding) dimensions, can be represented in a
one-dimensional niche space far more often than would be expected
by chance alone and perhaps always. This compatibility has not
previously been noticed. It indicates that real food webs fall in a
small subset of the mathematically possible food webs.
Professor Cohen discusses other apparently new features of real
food webs, including the constant ratio of the number of kinds of
prey to the number of kinds of predators in food webs that describe
a community. In conclusion he discusses possible extensions and
limitations of his results and suggests directions for future
research.
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